


A Single Crack

by Kasamira



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Arya Stark & Sansa Stark Have a Good Relationship, But neither are in a good place right now, Dark, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Freeform, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Sansa and Arya Talk, Sibling Bonding, Sisters, Vignette, broken things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 02:36:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28931115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kasamira/pseuds/Kasamira
Summary: "I gave her Ramsay's room."Arya's eyes snapped to meet her face."So you see, I'm not doing well at all."
Relationships: Arya Stark & Sansa Stark, Joffrey Baratheon/Sansa Stark, Jon Snow & Sansa Stark, Tyrion Lannister/Sansa Stark, mention of - Relationship, past - Relationship
Kudos: 43





	A Single Crack

**Author's Note:**

> Sansa and Arya desperately needed to talk in S8, they needed to talk about so many things. And so did everyone else for that matter. I wrote this quite late, all in the span of about 3 hours, so I apologize for any typos. This is very much the show verse, and I usually write from a far more books perspective.

"I gave her Ramsay's room."

Arya's dark eyes snapped up to her face.

"So you see, I'm not doing well at all."

*

"She doesn't understand why the North won't accept her. She's come with her entire army, three dragons, for us to fight the Others. They won't accept her, won't trust her, they barely want her help."

" _They_ won't trust her?" Sansa stared.

*

The solar was warm, though no fire lit her hearth. Since Jon had installed her as Lady of Winterfell she had not been idle. They had been at work in shifts, night and day, repairing the castle. The Bolton's might have burned it, but at least they hadn't been fool enough to leave it smoldering. Stonemasons, smiths, carpenters, and other skilled tradesmen had been seduced from their villages with coin, or dragged behind horses if they were reluctant.

Sansa had kept them on, visiting them each day herself, listening to their worries, answering the questions she could, and trying to heal what the Boltons had ravaged in their wake. Each night she and Brienne climbed the stairs to her Lady Mother and Lord Father's rooms. She still couldn't think of them as hers yet. Couldn't bear to. As it was, she could barely stand the sight of them.

"I couldn't mourn them in King's Landing."

Arya was always so silent now.

It had never been as such before, she'd always stomped her feet up the stairs, shrieking and covered in mud. Those were the memories she tried to hold onto. When she saw the courtyard covered in a fresh layer of snow, the snows never halted now, it had been days since she'd last seen the skies clear, and the sun bright overhead. Sansa tried to remember the snows from before.

A life time ago, they'd been heavy and wet. Soaking her gloves and freezing her fingers together until they'd been heavy and numb. She remembered summer snows in Winterfell when Bran and Arya had ambushed her just outside the keep, flinging snowballs from the rooftop and from the cover of the stables. She'd given chase, shrieking and hastily bending to form her own arsenal.

Arya had scorned a dress that day, dressing in an old pair of Jon's trousers that she practically swam in. Sansa had filled her skirts with snow balls and gave chase until both of them were breathless. She'd grabbed a handful of fabric, on the drawbridge, before slipping on the iced cobblestones. Her startled scream had brought Arya back to see if she was hurt. When she said she wasn't, Arya hit her in the face with another snowball, but Sansa grabbed her leg and pulled her down and was rubbing snow in her hair when Jory came along red faced and puffing, and pulled them apart, laughing.

Now she couldn't venture outside without feeling the ice settling into her flesh, the cold had a way of burrowing under clothes and slipping its tendrils into a person.

The snows ran sloppy and gray in the courtyard, packing down into ice within the hour if it weren't shoveled away.

*

"I saw them at the Twins. I was there." Arya frowned, and blinked.

"I ran, I've never run so fast. I meant to kill them, every single Frey and Bolton in sight. I had my hand around a knife, I wanted to save them." A gasping little laugh ripped its way out of her. "I would have waded through a sea of blood and bodies to get to them. To see Mother and Robb one last time..."

"They would have killed you. Or worse."

Any emotion Sansa had seen before was wiped from Arya's face when she answered.

"Yes. The Hound made that quite clear."

*

"The North has been through two wars, first against the Lannisters, and then a war against our own people."

She stared at Jon, surely he understood this. We are exhausted. She could barely find the strength to rise from bed each day, every morning felt like another crack forming.

She went to bed exhausted yet unable to sleep. Woke at the dawn with eyes that never stopped burning.

Some terrible part of her wanted to scream, not at him, at everything. Anything. Sansa was beyond tears, she didn't cry anymore, if she had had more than a second to her day that wasn't filled with the terror of being strong, the terror of feeding her people, that would have haunted her thoughts. Was her heart so cold, so hard that she couldn't cry anymore.

Brienne said it was the skies. "My father always said the sun brought smiles and laughter. He said my mother loved the sun, watching me swim in the Isle. When the skies are dark, so are the people."

That was kind of Brienne. It was difficult to find words sometimes, true words. Not the ones that came from her mouth with the lords, words of command, reassurance, words in the yard, questions, so many questions. When had true kindness become so difficult?

Had it been when they cut her father's head off? Was that when all the light had gone out of the world, a piece of her had died that day. She still dreamed of his legs, jerking against the steps at the Sept of Baelor.

She could hear the hammers and chisels outside her Mother's rooms. At night, she would cross the room to where heavy tapestries used to hang, and throw open the high narrow windows one by one. The cold night air would swirl around her, into the chamber, as she stood facing the dark, cold and empty handed.

She would stand in the darkness. If another had seen her, they'd say she was watching the moon or the stars, perhaps observing the sentries on the wall. Sansa never did that.

It was the one part of her day she was alone. Left with nothing but her own thoughts. Thoughts and fears and worries she did her best to silence in the final minutes before bed.

*

"Joffrey liked having a plaything to torment. He couldn't touch Margaery, she was surrounded by ladies and guards, and her brother." her breath caught.

"He thought I was jealous of her," laughter, a bit broken, but true laughter cracked her lips. As she remembered the day her broken betrothal had been announced.

"I could hardly tell him it was the happiest day of my life, that I pitied her, poor girl. But she was welcome to that monster, if that's the price her family would pay for a Queen," she knew Margaery had paid dearly.

"Robert used to hit Cersei. The servants would whisper about it, and the first time Joffrey slapped me, the whispers became louder."

She remembered her bed in King's Landing. Laying there in the gray light of dawn, fear curdling her stomach, wondering if this would be the night Tyrion came to her bed. Too fearful to sleep, hands balled into fists in her covers, Sansa would press her hands into the colorful decorations at her throat.

Purples, black, and green tinged yellows had littered her body. On her arms she had five matching sets, each twins to the other. On her throat there was a necklace as dark as the amythests Ser Dontos had given her.

"Cersei told him a king did not lower himself to hit his lady. Joff had the kingsguard beat me after that." He'd thought himself so clever. 

"When he died." she stopped. Started again,

"When he died, I almost stayed too long. I couldn't stop watching. The way he choked, you know he looked scared. His eyes turned red, the whites went all pink, and blood started to bubble at his lips. He looked like a little animal, and made noises like Ramsay's girls did when he cut them. I almost stayed too long."

Arya was very silent. Her eyes were dark, like black vipers eyes. It almost felt like they were playing that game again. The lying game. This time she was winning.

"I was running for the godswood, across the drawbridge when Lady Tanda told me I _had a good heart_." her mouth twisted as she formed the words. Those words felt a lie even more now, in this room, this night, than they had then when she'd carried amethysts from Asshai at her neck.

"That not many girls who'd been scorned and set aside by a man would weep at his death. _She patted my hand_. It was only when I touched my face, I realized I was crying. I'd never been so happy. I'm amazed there wasn't a smile to give me away."

Fire cracked in the hearth. Sansa was down to just embers now, her fire was almost out.

"And I wanted to tell her, she was wrong. My heart had never felt so black."

*

  
Arya was the only one she could speak these things to now. Arya was the only one who could truly understand. She looked at her sister, willing her to understand, needing it more no than ever before.

"If I could have cut his bastards heart from his chest, I would. I told you, Sansa, what I did to the Freys. I'd do it all again, to every Lannister in King's Landing."

She would. Looking into Arya's eyes now, the candles flickering, she saw her own reflected back.

*

Of all the rooms in Winterfell’s Great Keep, her Lady Mother's bedchambers were the hottest. She seldom had to light a fire, they didn't have the wood to spare anymore. All timber cut was being sharpened and set with obsidian edges. It had taken weeks to repair the hot springs that ran through the castle's walls. The Bolton's had construction well under way by the time she and Jon had rooted them out. Hot waters had welled and rushed out of a broken wall, like blood from a wound. She'd heard from Lord Bolton that it had been a feat to find skilled men to heal the break.

Now the scalding rivers rushed through its walls and chambers like the life blood in a man's body, driving out the chill, warming the glass gardens, and stopping the ground from freezing. If it hadn't been for the hot springs they never would have been able to dig trenches, nor fill them with all manner of gruesome traps tipped in dragon glass.

Open pools of water had smoked and steam rising in billows off its glass surface in a dozen courtyards. She kept her people warm, clean. Sansa had seen little enough of King's Landing, and Arya the streets of Braavos and the Riverlands to know that unclean people brought disease. Winterfell had never been so full in living memory, she would not bring in bodies that would rise at night because of her carelessness.

*

" _They_ are _us_ , Jon. Our people. All that's left of the North is breathing inside this castle. Have you heard your Dragon Queen? Seen her through our peoples eyes and not just your own? They're scared. You left the North a King and came back a Lord."

"Aye, I bent the knee for the North. It was the only way she'd come, Sansa you saw her armies, her dragons. We need her dragons, the Others bring ice and cold, so strong it would freeze a man in his own bed. We can't win without those dragons."

Sansa looked at Jon, her brother.

The window was open, she could hear men hammering in the smiths. Could feel the crack yawning open in her chest. When would it end? Her eyes were burning again. 

"There hasn't been a King in the North for nearly three hundred years, when Torrhen Stark knelt he gave up his crown. Surely it occurred to you that when our lords gave you this power, they also gave themselves the power to take it away."

She'd never seen his cheeks so hollow, the scar around his eye stood out against his face. She'd never asked him how he'd gotten that, it was difficult to focus on his face.

Her eyes kept blurring, sliding.

How much longer would it go on? Could she go on? Jon had only gotten back today, and every moment gaped before her.

Her duty.

"Sansa," he grasped her hand. "I had no choice. This is the only way."

Her hands were so cold. What was left? They trembled when she gave Jon the scroll.

"We've had word from Last Hearth's maester."

Jon's eyes widened, his scar twisted and gaped around the creases in his eye. They were too young for such lines, surely. He'd always had such nice eyes, just like Arya's, like Father's. His hand snapped forward, dark head bending to read the words.

Sansa folded her hands in front of her. She knew what the parchment said.

_"The Wall has fallen. The dead walk. A dragon flies with them."_

*

Arya had Father's eyes. Cold gray eyes that saw everything. 

"No."

There was so much in a word. Sansa couldn't remember the last time she'd said no, and have it mean something.

"I don't. I can't do this Arya." 

Once the words had started the poured out in a rush from her mouth. 

"I can't. Be _this, be her._ I never wanted to be Lady Stark. _It doesn't suit me._ Ever since I was a little girl, I knew, we both knew Lady Stark would be Robb's wife. _Mother_. Not us. _Never_ us. It was always Mother. I wanted to be the _Queen_ ," her laugh really was a broken wretched thing. "Every day I wake up in _their_ bed, with this broken aching hole in my chest. I can't be her, that Southern lady I used to play at, with her pretty dresses, and shining _courtesies_. I can't. That girl went south, and never came back. _That girl died down there and they killed her._ "

The key to the North. Having a claim, none of it meant anything because having a claim meant they were gone.

Arya took her hand, her arm. Turning her in the glow of dying embers, staring at her with Father's eyes.

"No. Sansa look at me. We are all that's left. You and me. And you can't show a single crack. Not to them out there and not to me. Because they'll see, they'll see everything. _The lies, the crack, the hole, the gaping chasm in us all._ You are Lady Stark, and _the Starks hold the North_."

"Must I do it all alone?"

"No. Never alone."

**Author's Note:**

> I've become fascinated with the idea of a Witcher and ASOIAF crossover. Not anything in depth, but with Sansa and Jaskier meeting. Sansa has always had such terrible luck with bards, she really deserves to meet a good one. And I think she and Jaskier would get on. After Marillion I'm quite worried she's done with singers. I just need a reason Jaskier would brave the Vale... is Geralt with him? How does Baelish fit in? Hmmm...


End file.
